October 16, 2007
Technology to Study Psychosocial Stress
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh are studying how effective a wrist-mounted instrument can be for measuring psychosocial stress exposure during the course of daily life. The study is funded by NIH for the first year of a four-year project designed to study environmental factors that people encounter every day that may increase their risk of certain diseases.
Using an instrument called eWatch which is a multisensor package about the size of a large wristwatch that has been developed by Daniel Siewiorek, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, and Asim Smailagic, research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s College of Engineering. Both are co-investigators in the new study.
Previous studies have determined that people who report highly stressful lifestyles may develop higher rates of a variety of illnesses, ranging from viral infection to heart disease, but measuring exposure to stress is problematic.
In the new study, each participant will wer an eWatch, which can sense sound, motion, ambient light, skin temperature and other factors that provide clues about the wearer’s location, health status and current activity. Every 45 minutes over the course of five days, the eWatch will prompt wearers to take part in a 2-to-3-minute interview. The instrument will record their response to questions about their current activities, such as "Working hard?" and "Working fast?" By the end of the study, several hundred people will have tested the eWatch.
Previous research has shown that responses to such interviews help predict who will show higher rates of plaque development in the arteries, a risk factor for heart attack or stroke. Using interviews in real time allows researchers to quantify how stressors affect one’s daily life, as well as to pinpoint when these effects begin and when they end.
Use of the eWatch technology should assist researchers in finding the optimal method for responding to such interviews during daily activities, whether by pressing a button, moving the wrist or speaking into a wireless ear bug device. Environmental data collected by the eWatch also may assist the researchers in characterizing the types of environments people find most stressful, so that their location, such as home or work, may be recorded automatically.
Source: AAAS
Posted by rsk at October 16, 2007 12:49 PM